The Tattoo Summoner [System Apocalypse]

Sebastian's face was tensed in pain. He cursed under his breath, then looked away towards the Interface projection. Tanya could see the moment his Will kicked in. All visible discomfort was gone. The legalese on the projection changed over and over. She may as well have not been there anymore.

Unlike Tanya's, where changes would delete and reappear as if on a computer, his edits showed the previous versions struck through. Each time she glanced up, there was more and more crossed-out text and layers of revisions. It was starting to look less like a contract and more like a palimpsest of panic — black lines slashed over older words until the thing barely breathed.

She wasn't sure which of them was making the bigger mess.

Her machine hummed, steady as a pulse, but her stomach had begun to tighten. The design had looked clean in the stencil, the glasses, the gavel, and the reflection, but under the skin, it was turning swampy. The join between the gavel and the arms of the glasses had lost definition, the contrast muddied, and she couldn't tell if the darker ink was helping or burying it alive.

The metaphor "seeing through the lens of law" was slipping from her like a dream she'd half written down and then spilt coffee on. Every pass of the needle blurred another edge of the meaning.

She dabbed away blood and ink, squinting at the patch she'd just shaded. It wasn't reading as a gavel anymore. It wasn't reading as anything. Just a blunt shape wedged between metal and skin.

Am I doing my best?

She realised that was what was getting to her. Tanya had never been on the other end of a Pact like this before. If it wasn't constant effort, The System could decide she'd broken the Pact, and she could die. Even knowing that she'd determined what she'd promised wasn't helping. She hadn't expected this to be her best work, but she had spitefully gone in with the idea she'd give it her all. Was this her all? It was going wrong now. That wasn't against the Pact, otherwise she'd be dead—unless it was only based on the final result—but that wasn't what doing her best was about either.

Sebastian exhaled sharply beside her, jaw tightening. She looked down at Sebastian's arm and could feel energy surging through him. It prickled at her skin like electricity. Tanya felt the air pulse with it.

Tanya wiped again, slower this time. The lines she'd thought were confident now looked panicked. It wasn't just ugly; it was uncertain, and uncertainty was poison in magic from everything she'd seen so far.

She could hear her own breath now. Ishita had gone from rigidly upright to leaning back. Ishita didn't know much about her tattooing, especially now, so she must just be easy to read. Somehow, that was worse, if Ishita could tell, then maybe Sebastian could too.

Sebastian's muttering turned to silence, his hand still hovering mid-edit.

Tanya tried another thin line, something to pull the composition back together — but the more she added, the less it worked. The reflections in the glasses were fighting the gavel, the gavel was fighting the arms, and the whole thing was turning into one anxious blur.

She caught herself gripping the machine too hard.

Fuck it.

She summoned Assistant, knowing she wouldn't have to explain. Keeping this tattoo to just her own hands would help with Vitality, and keep in precious information about what she was capable of, but she'd promised to try her best. This was part of her best…maybe.

Sebastian's eyes snapped to the tattoo reaching out of Tanya's skin. He didn't say anything. He just watched with what Tanya could only describe as a midpoint between curiosity and awe until Assistant was fully out and floating around the tattoo to make some sense of it.

"Is it going well?" he asked.

She could almost hear the Thought Subpoena coming, so why lie?

"No. I'm summoning help."

"Hm," Sebastian said. He looked her up and down with silent judgment. "Well, I see you are still trying your best."

The statement made her feel sick.

Why was she here? Why had she agreed to this?

She didn't let herself spiral for too long. She would fix it.

The image was too messy, so the intentions probably were too. Her mind reached for some solution. How to fix a messy tattoo.

Assistant joined her in thinking, like another person humming in meditation over the other.

That was what she needed.

The memory hit.

Not gently, either. Like her own past had leaned over her shoulder, grabbed her wrist, and said: You've done this before.

It was a long time ago, soon after she'd opened The Wyrm and Needle. Tanya expected the memory to be hazier from how long ago it was, but it was as sharp as her memories always were these days.

Tanya was elbow-deep in a box of decorations she'd been gifted by a family friend in the shop. She used gifted loosely; Tanya was convinced by this point that they were given to her to avoid a charity shop trip. Aside from a couple of mirrors and old art prints, which she'd given pride of place on the side table, the rest of it was scattered across the floor in piles ranging from charity to things that straight up needed to go in the bin. The recycling was the worst; new postcode meant new rules, and Tanya barely knew the colour of the different bins at this point, never mind what she could put in each.

Her phone buzzed.

Finch: Sorry, running late. Be there in 5.

Why was he so early?

13:07

Tanya jerked to her feet, looking around the mess she'd made of her shop. Time had vanished in a morning of decisions and musty smells.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

She dumped everything into boxes, trying to keep them sorted and then gave up for a more haphazard approach.

As she shoved the final box into her overfilled cupboard and clicked the door shut with her back, Finch dashed in, out of breath.

Finch pulled off his fingerless gloves and scarf. He had the same tousled brown curls and obnoxiously long eyelashes he had back in college. "Hey, I'm sorry! Traffic was terrible—"

"No, no, it's fine," Tanya replied, stepping away from the door. It came open behind her, and all of the piled-up junk clattered across the floor again, even messier than it had been before her cleaning rush.

Tanya flinched, unsure whether to be more embarrassed at the mess or the strange things in it. From here, she could see the lawn flamingo with half its face missing, and the clown doll with chipped paint that made it look like it had a huge fang.

Any dreams of pretending to be cool to the person she thought was the coolest back in school were dashed.

He picked up a pink, fluffy picture frame, then leapt backwards as he noticed the clown. "Woah. Tan, I knew you were a bit wild back in the day, but have you fully lost your shit?"

That opened the gates for them to be more like they used to be. Beneath the bags under Finch's eyes and the way his leather jackets had been replaced by vintage sweaters, Tanya could see the same old troublemaker she'd skipped school with.

He showed her a few possible spots on his sleeve and offered up the back of his calf. Before Tanya could get distracted by how muscular his calves were, or the fact that they were twice as big a canvas as any other spot he'd offered, Tanya noticed the scrawl on his ankle.

"Oh my god," she said. "Is that the stupid bat?"

"You mean the dashing mascot of Graveyard Frequency?" Finch asked, with fake incredulousness.

"I can't believe we called a band that. We weren't even good."

"Well, if you won't be nice to him," Finch joked, pulling up his socks.

Tanya groaned. "No, let me look. Let me look."

Finch backed away, cackling. "Not if you're going to be mean to him!'

She wrestled his long sock down. "Ugh."

"My ankles aren't that ugly, are they?"

Tanya scoffed. "It's terrible." The bat was slightly lopsided, with scratchy lines in places where she hadn't gone deep enough and an asymmetric face that she had been proud of at the time and now was mortified was ever her own work.

"It's… charming?" Finch offered.

"I'll pay you to let me fix it," Tanya said, only half joking.

"Alright. Bet."

Tanya traced it a few times onto different paper. The obvious choice was to neaten the lines and make it thicker in the process. She also tried sketching out a couple of collages for around the bat, one that was in the same loose sketchy style and another that was a range of styles to try and modernise this specific one as a statement.

"You look like you're gonna kill that piece of paper," Finch said.

Tanya became aware of her furrowed brow, the tension in her shoulders, and the way her pen-holding hand was becoming more and more like a fist. She shook out the tension. Then she shrugged. "It's really bad."

Finch rolled his eyes. "Yeah, you said."

"No, but really though. I can't find any way of changing the weird shapes without it gettin' super murky and lookin' worse."

Finch shrugged. "Just black out the whole thing then? That's what people do, right?"

Tanya's hand had a mind of its own. She didn't need to fix the existing lines; she could use more blocks of black and make an image in the skin left over.

"What is it? Oh—oh!" Finch said. In the hatched-through sections of the sketch, the new artwork came to life. It was still a bat, but one made of the gaps between blocks of black.

Tanya went back to the sketch, working out where to fill and where to leave. The moment it clicked, she returned to tattooing. Sebastian's Vitality would be lowering just from her being in the process of tattooing. With the intensity the finish would pull from him, she wanted him to have as much left as possible.

Bit by bit, it came together. The gavels were no longer the arm of the glasses themselves; they were the space between the glasses' arms and the shadows reflecting off them, a huge component of the design but one that wasn't obvious unless you looked at the skin between the ink.

A perfect metaphor for the kind of man he was.

She drew closer and closer to the end, sweat on her brow and fatigue growing in her arm.

Sebastian finished first, relaxing into the chair with a nod.

"Is it fixed?" Tanya asked, not looking up.

'Yes," Ishita said, the relief in her voice coming out with a sob. "It makes new stipulations," she said, slowly, like she was still reading it. "I still do what you want, but part of what you want is for my actions and decisions to be aligned with myself."

"Tricky piece of unwinding the thought process too," Sebastian said, teeth clenched now that he was no longer distracted by his own workings.

"I'm almost there," Tanya said. "Ishita, get ready. Sebastian, what's your Vitality at?"

"6," he said.

"It won't be enough."

Tanya completed the final line and pulled away, not even remembering to turn off the machine.

"Ishita, now," Tanya said.

Ishita's jaw tensed. She didn't answer, just reached over with her prosthetic hand. The inked fingertips touched Sebastian's sternum.

The reaction was instant. The glow in the joints of her prosthesis dulled, then guttered. The blackness seeped away into watercolour greys and shrivelled down, deflated and wrinkled. Her whole arm seemed to wilt, the way fruit bruises from the inside out.

Ishita didn't make a sound; she just sucked in a breath every couple of seconds.

Sebastian's breath rattled. His head lolled forward.

Tanya bit down hard on her tongue. She couldn't even do anything. With shaking hands, she grabbed the phone, clenching it in case she needed to ask whoever was on the other end for help.

The moment before the prosthetic would fully vanish, Ishita unsummoned it. Tanya could tell from the way it seeped into her wrist. She hadn't even known the tattoo could give Vitality to people who weren't Ishita until now.

Ishita swapped arms and groaned, this time grabbing his forearm directly. The glow jumped to her skin. Her real arm flared bright under the surface, blood rising, veins darkening until it looked like the pain was crawling into her.

Sebastian exhaled once, then didn't inhale again.

The Interface projection vanished.

The machine's buzz became the only sound, small and stupid in the silence that followed.

Ishita's eyes rolled back, and she crumpled sideways, hand slipping off Sebastian's arm. Tanya's heart slammed. She wanted this to stop.

She had felt this before, but never seen it. The impossible stillness that came just before she'd died the same way. The way her mind had refused to believe it was happening, even as everything went black.

Ishita was dead. Then she gasped—a deep, drowning gasp that seemed to drag the air back into the room with her. Her arm jerked, muscles seizing, veins still burning black under the skin. She pushed herself upright, coughing, and pressed her ruined hand against Sebastian's arm.

He convulsed. Then drew in a slow, ragged breath.

Just when Tanya thought it was over, it all happened again.

The bags under Ishita's eyes grew darker. A clump of hair fell out of her scalp, fluttering onto her cardigan sleeve.

Another gasp. Her hand back on his arm. Another slow breath.

Ishita withdrew her arm intentionally that time.

Tanya realised her tattoo gun was still on and flicked the off switch.

The tattoo on Sebastian's skin shimmered briefly, the scabbing already begun, sealing itself faster than it had any right to.

Sebastian blinked, disoriented, then gave a weak half-laugh. "I'm alive."

Tanya let out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding. Her hand was shaking, the fatigue in her arm catching up all at once.

She looked from him to Ishita. His cheeks were flushed, his hair tousled. Hers were sunken; that patch of hair was still on her shoulder. He looked so alive, and she looked so…dead.

Tanya felt the echo of her own death in the back of her mind, that feeling of waking up and the colours of the world all looking just a bit wrong.

"The Pact is fixed, all of it?" Tanya asked Ishita.

Her eyelids fluttered, and for the first time, Tanya realised she had no eyelashes, not a single one. She wondered if they were there before Sebastian died or if she'd lost them when Tanya had.

The thought brought back the churning in her stomach.

"It all looks right," Ishita said.

Tanya didn't have the mental space to pull it up herself.

"Can we go?" Tanya asked, but she didn't wait for a response. With shaking legs, Tanya got up and walked out of the room, spamming the lift button and watching every floor ding down.

She didn't hear what the receptionist said on the way out.

The feeling was building in her stomach—in her chest.

She ducked round the side of the building and threw up all over the large black bin beside it.

Tanya could've blamed it on her -2 to Vitality, or the adrenaline still burning through her veins. But she knew neither of those was it. She'd just watched Ishita die for both of them. Again.